TV Review: Seriously Funny Kids

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have said one thing more than any other single thing that I have ever said. More than “please”, more than “thank you”, more than “you tell anyone about this and I will ruin you!” And that one phrase that has come to be known as the thing that most defines me as a person is:

Pictured in the sweater he was buried in.

Heidi Klum is this generation’s Bill Cosby.

The resemblance is uncanny. They were both mammals, they both existed, the list goes on and on! If only Bill Cosby were alive today to see the stellar work of his rightful successor.

Last night saw the debut of Frau Klum’s latest television “show”, “Seriously Funny Kids”. And just like the late Cos’, Heidi seems to believe that kids, when you speak to them and listen to their half formed, uneducated responses, unfiltered by experience or knowledge of acceptable social tact, often say what one could call, the darndest things. I assume the only reason Klum’s “new” Lifetime “program” wasn’t given the “Kids Say…” moniker was because it’s too hard anymore to know who’s parent company owns which what, so they just figured it would be safer to call it something else.

When a show begins it’s relationship with the television viewing audience with an attempted reassurance in it’s very title, you’re already setting yourself up for an awkward evening. If a show has to try to convince you of what it’s premise is, it probably isn’t what it’s telling you it’s supposed to be. You have to have a certain confidence, bordering on arrogance if you’re a bad TV show trying to make it out in the big cruel world of a billion channels worth of choice. “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, that is a declarative statement. They are telling you, in no uncertain terms that what you are about to see are THE funniest home videos in the entirety of America and it’s controlled territories, no questions asked, end of story. It’s not “Really Guys, America’s Funniest Home Videos”. I wouldn’t believe that shit for an instant, and neither should you. And as such, neither should you believe that these kids are “seriously” funny.

There’s too much in this one picture that doesn’t make sense to even begin to comment on.

Heidi seems to believe that her qualifications of having borne a litter of Seal pups gives her an intimate knowledge of which kids are and are not “Seriously Funny”. Her interviews with kids run the gambit of topics from asking the infants if they have a girlfriend, to taking every opportunity to imply how much she enjoys her husband’s pock speckled baby wand. Her innuendo are so thick that even the kids try to get her to dial it back.

Ultimately Heidi proves several things in this half hour that time will never remember existed. Firstly, the long-held understanding that Germans don’t understand the meaning of the word “funny”. It’s not their fault, they’re a dour people. There actually isn’t a German word for funny. The closest they have translates roughly to “that which momentarily distracts from my reality of sorrow and anger”, and that is hard to fit in the TV guide.

And secondly, that just because children will blurt out anything that comes into their mind instinctively and without any sort of thought as to what any of it might mean, it doesn’t mean it’s funny. Least of all SERIOUSLY funny. Kids get a lot of leeway because they don’t know better yet, but I think that just sends the wrong message and I believe our over crowded prison system will back me up on this. If some one, anyone really, came up to you rubbing pancakes on the sides of their face and shouted “I’ve got a pancake hat!”, then giggled like a maniac for ten straight minutes, you would empty three cans of pepper spray into their face before you stopped screaming. But if a kid does it, we have to laugh along with them and pretend what they’re doing isn’t completely fucking psychotic? Bullshit. You have to learn some time that that kind of shit is unacceptable and you either learn it at home, where these mistakes can be easily remedied, or you learn it in a court of law where all of the pancakes in the world won’t lessen your sentence. Teach your kids how to act now, or they’ll see first hand how “Seriously Funny” their first prison tattoo is before you know it.

Or I may just be so confused by that promo picture that I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I’m gonna grab a pudding pop and my blankie and take a nap.